Last year, Sony Ericsson was criticized heavily for releasing a sub-par high-end Android phone, the X10. To add to their woes, the company took ages to update the handset to Android 2.1 Ã‰clair, and decided not to upgrade the handset to Android 2.2 FroYo. For developers, the locked boot loader on SE’s handsets made things tough for them.

However, since the beginning of this year the company has changed for good. The 2011 range of Xperia handsets have decent specs, and most important ran the latest version of Android Gingerbread. The company has also been providing timely software updates to its Xperia handsets, with every new software update adding new features. The company also released a boot loader unlocking tool for its handsets, and wrote a guide on how to build a Linux kernel, showing their support to the developers and their work.

Today, in a bid to support help the developers more, the company has decided to assist the FreeXperiagroup of developers. The FreeXperia’ group of developers have played a major role in bringing CyanogenMod 7 to all Xperia handsets. However, the CM7 ROM for all Xperia handsets have one major issue the camera does not work properly. This is because Sony uses some proprietary drivers for their camera module, making things tough for developers to reverse engineer them.

Now, Sony Ericsson has decided to help the FreeXperia’ team of developers on many issues, including the camera, where they will be providing debugged and rebuilt library binaries to them. SE will also be supporting the devs. by providing them with approximately 20 devices.

Earlier this year, Samsung also supported the Team Hacksung’ developers by providing them with a Samsung Galaxy S II. However, while the developers have been successful in porting CM7 to the device, there are still some major issues to be resolved, including Bluetooth audio (A2DP). Hopefully, Samsung will learn something from Sony Ericsson and help the Team Hacksung developers with the Bluetooth Audio issue.

I’m a long time user of SE phones because of their awesome build and quality. But in the advent of Android, SE is way behind the others and that’s one of the factors that hinders SE’s dominance in the android phone market and this has caused me to switch to Samsung.